Karl T. Gruben
Director of Practice Information Support
Squire, Sanders & Dempsey LLP - Cleveland, OH
How Do I Stay Interested?
Law Library Journal Fall, 2001
Upon learning early in my career that Bill Murphy had been with Chicago's Kirkland & Ellis law firm practically his entire career,1 I said to myself, "How could anyone stand to be in one place for that long—the job would be so boring." At the time, I thought I would be at Vinson & Elkins for three years, four years max, and then move. I have now been with Vinson & Elkins LLP for twenty-three years and have no plans to leave, quit, or, the good Lord willing, be fired. How? I mean how! I wonder myself. When Paul George asked me to contribute to this collection, I started to think about my career and about what has kept me in this job so long, even, at times, contrary to my best intentions.
I've seen many people who, though burned out, remain in their job. When I was in the air force, we referred to someone like that as a ROAD officer ("Retired On Active Duty"). They were generally disliked because nothing ever happened around them and little got accomplished. Age didn't have much to do with it as there were young ROADs and old ROADs. I've never wanted to be like that. I think the constant challenges of a vibrantly active firm, service work with library organizations, and the need for constant education and learning have kept me interested in what I do and had much to do with letting me stay in one job for nearly a quarter of a century without becoming a ROAD.
When I started with V&E in 1977, in essentially the position I still hold today, there were 195 attorneys in three offices. Today we have 780 attorneys and nine offices. Sheer growth has created some problems which I had to solve, and, while many of them could be perceived as boring (e.g., rearranging collections, moving satellite libraries, buying collections for new offices), they still stimulated my thought processes. For example, when purchasing materials for a new office, do you go with the tried and true sets or do you try comparable material from different publishers? If you try to do something different, from whom do you have to obtain permission? Do you have to obtain permission at all? And today, do you stay with print resources or try to convince the partners that electronic ones are a cheaper and better alternative? Finally, what do you do when, inevitably, someone starts griping?
Technological growth has contributed greatly to my satisfaction with the work environment. I brought the first TI Silent 700 to the firm, to communicate with Dialog at the "blazing" speed of 1200 baud. We already had Lexis, and I got the local rep to increase the speed of that modem from 1200 to 2400 baud. These were important issues in the late 1970s, and if you think about it, they are the same issues we have today—bandwidth, just different levels. Using a personal computer was also a learning experience. One day it arrived on my desk, and there it sat, mocking me. I would occasionally turn it on and get a "c:\" prompt, but I didn't really know what else to do. One day I got tired of doing that and bought a DOS handbook. After some perusal I could do simple DOS commands and realized that software was where the action was, so I joined a local PC users' group and began to learn, downloading shareware and freeware and going online and learning about PCs.
So my education in computers was self-taught, with me reading everything I could get my hands on about modems and settings and shareware and available resources because, you understand, no real money could be spent until something was worked out in advance by yours truly. And now, we have the Internet and Internet/Intranet products. The challenge presented in keeping up with that is pretty self-evident.
In the mid-1980s, I joined the chorus of AALL voices singing "the Annual Meeting programming isn't meeting my needs" blues, as my needs at that time seemed about three to five years ahead of those of everyone else. Instead of getting the grease I needed as a squeaky wheel, I got appointed to the AALL Education Committee, which at that time put together the Annual Meeting program. I soon found out that this undertaking—developing a program for an Annual Meeting—took a great deal of time and effort from many more people than I had imagined.2 I recommend getting on this committee (now called the Annual Meeting Program Selection Committee) if you really want to see the breadth of our Association. Most of the programming comes from AALL chapters, SISs, and committees, and they are a widely diverse, richly eccentric group.
Regarding education, somewhere in those early years at V&E I went to law school at South Texas College of Law, graduated, and passed the bar. Given a choice (this is code for what I will do when I win the Texas lottery), I would probably go back to school on a part-time basis. No particular degree plan, just take whatever suited my fancy. My time in law school was the most intellectually stimulating experience I have ever had. Trying to hold two contradictory thoughts in my mind at the same time and articulate either upon demand is difficult for yours truly. (Heavens, I got through most of my undergraduate schoolwork based on what I had learned in high school, and I went to "Big State University.") Law school made me think, and think in a different manner. I doubt I can still do that work, but it would be fun to learn other new things. I have taken courses in the evenings since law school but, as with most people, time is a very precious commodity and I have other demands on my time.
While I am styled as the "Director of Firm Libraries" at Vinson & Elkins, I generally regard myself as a reference librarian. I spend about half my time dealing with administration, planning new stuff, and fixing old stuff that doesn't work too well anymore, but the rest of my time is devoted to frontline reference. Working in a large law firm gives me the opportunity to deal with an incredibly wide variety of questions, ranging in difficulty from "where is the bathroom" to "where can I find the civil code of Venezuela in English?" (or "a tax convention between Greece and Latvia, please"), and all needing to be answered in the space of fifteen minutes. The great thing is that this range of questions is not a sometime thing—it is almost always an everyday thing. (Well, generally people around here do seem to know where the bathroom is but, since two of the conference rooms on this floor are just off the library, we do get outsiders without a clue.) When people ask me what I do, though, I am sometimes at a loss because to explain what I do would take much more time than they would want to devote to the subject. If they make the wrong crack, though ("Oh, you get first crack at all the bestsellers" is my all-time least favorite), they have to stand still and get the full lecture from Library Science 101.
But working at a growing, mentally challenging firm is not the entire answer to a fulfilling career. The adrenaline wears off, some of the questions begin to repeat themselves, and, much as I like to help people, there are a finite number of ways to direct people to the loo. Now I find that much of what I enjoy in my career comes from the service work I do with library associations. Not just law library associations, though I've done a lot with them on committees, SISs, and the executive board.3 I also work with our statewide library association and our local Friends of the Public Library group. My work with the Texas Library Association goes back further in time than does my association with AALL, as I joined TLA while I was in library school. Shortly after I took a professional job, I was elected chair of one of their four divisions. As with most associations, TLA will keep calling as long as you keep saying "yes." Over the years, TLA has called on me to lobby our state legislature, work on the steering committee of a Governor's Conference on Libraries, and serve on its executive board. I was lucky to have a library school professor who convinced me that all libraries are essentially the same, and that we all have ideas we can share with one another. While we work in different environments (mine is four hundred feet up in a downtown skyscraper while the school librarian in the suburbs is in a single-story public facility), we have many of the same goals, such as providing quality information and protecting First Amendment rights. I am certain that I have picked up some of my best ideas from school librarians.
I have also been a member of the local public library's Friends group off and on over the past twenty years. Currently I am "on," rejoining a couple of years ago at the urging of two law librarian friends. These friends run the annual Friends' book sale, which is not a small event in a city the size of Houston. Our group goes to a suburban un-air-conditioned space (that means no heat in the winter and no cooling in the summer) where we open and sort the books from mounds of boxes into Dewey Decimal categories. The opening of the annual sale is much like the land rushes of the late nineteenth century—don't get in the way or you will be trampled. The money created by the sale is used to fund major collections of art books, a film library, and a circulating collection of art reproductions, as well as helping to support professional development for the library's staff members. We have a good time at the sorting and I have made friends with people I did not know very well, as well as reacquaint myself with people I've known for twenty-five years. To one used to dealing with a very small facet of the world of books, the diversity of the world of English-language books is fascinating and, occasionally, overwhelming.
So, how have I stayed interested? My environment has changed over the years, though I've stayed in the same place. I've continued to learn and develop new skills. I have engaged in service work. And, oh yes, I'm married to an attorney. We talk about the law. When she talks about legal issues, I understand what she is saying and it helps her to verbalize those issues in increasingly complicated and nebulous areas of emerging law. Talking with her also helps me to understand the problems my firm's attorneys face and to appreciate the amount of work and time it takes for them to accomplish the quality legal representation they must provide. Talking about the law with your wife is fairly geeky, I'll admit, but after all, I'm a librarian.
1. Editor's Note: William D. Murphy officially served as librarian of the Chicago law firm of Kirkland & Ellis from 1952 to 1981. Thereafter, he was a very active "librarian emeritus." For more about this illustrious law librarian, a president of AALL and a recipient in 1987 of the Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award, see Frank G. Houdek, From the Editor: Bill Murphy Remembered, 88 Law Libr. J. 145 (1996); Remembrances of William D. Murphy, 88 Law Libr. J. 148 (1996) (essays by Jack Ellenberger, Patrick E. Kehoe, Thomas H. Reynolds, Margaret A. Leary, Joyce Malden, Earl C. Borgeson, Ed Strable, and Eileen Murphy).
2. Editor's Note: Karl T. Gruben certainly should know about the work involved in planning an AALL Annual Meeting program—he served on the committees responsible for the educational aspects of the Annual Meetings in 1988, 1990, and 1991.
3. Editor's Note: Karl T. Gruben is currently serving as treasurer of the American Association of Law Libraries, filling a three-year term (1999–2002). He previously served as president of the Houston Area Law Librarians.
For More Information About Law Librarianship or the AALL Recruitment Committee, contact committee chair Sarah Mauldin.